A Conversation With Susan Sontag

BILL MOYERS: Susan Sontag has seen war close up in her long career as a writer and activist. Her famous books On Photography is required reading in almost every serious photography course in the world. And her novels and nonfiction books, including Illness as a Metaphor, have been translated into a score of languages.

BILL MOYERS: She also writes and directs films and plays, and is an honorary citizen of Sarajevo for her work there during the city's horrific siege in the mid '90s. Her latest book, Regarding the Pain of Others, is about war and how the images of war affect our perception of reality.

What did you want us, the reader, to take away from this book?

SUSAN SONTAG: What I want people to think about is how serious war is, how it is elective. It's not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. I want people to think about what war is. And at the same time, I know it's very hard.

In fact, I end the book by saying in a way the world is divided into people who know have had direct experience of war and people who haven't. And if you've had a direct experience of war-- and I think every single soldier or journalist who's been in the trenches, in the front line, or observer, or human rights worker, or anybody who has actually had a direct experience, prolonged direct experience of war, knows that when you go home and people say, how was it? Or was it like? You really can't explain. You feel as if you can never tell them what it was really like. That it is both more horrible than any kind of pictures could convey. And maybe one of the most horrible parts of it is that it becomes a normality. It becomes a world that you can live in. And that journalists, and soldiers, and observers of all kinds-- and human rights workers-- who live in this world of constant conflict and death, it becomes a normality.

SUSAN SONTAG: There is a culture of war, and what I feel more and more is that this country-- the country that's my country, that I care most about-- is becoming accustomed to the idea of perpetual war. So this is a book that really wants to talk about how horrible war is. Precisely in the way that images both convey it and can't convey it.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean? They convey a slice of it, but not the totality of it?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, of course, they can't convey the totality. That goes without saying. No image can. But it's also that when you watch things through an image, it's precisely affirming that you're safe because you are watching it. You're here, not there. And in a way, you're innocent. You're not doing it. You're neither being killed nor are you firing the gun. You become a spectator. It confirms you in a kind of feeling of invulnerability. On one level it's people looking at war, it's spectacle. But they don't just look at it as spectacle. They just look at it as well, that's a terrible thing, really terrible, and they turn the channel.

BILL MOYERS: You write "compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action or it withers. Otherwise, you say, one starts to get bored, apathetic, cynical." Flip the channels. What do you do with your compassion?

Well, I am an evangelist. I talk a lot. And I try to spread information. I'm very big on the internet and I communicate with hundreds of people, and circulate information that I'm getting from reliable news sources that doesn't get into the papers or on television. I speak. I write. I never thought that the new book would be so topical. And I hate--

BILL MOYERS: Oh, it's creating such a conversation topic.

SUSAN SONTAG: I hate the idea that's is so topical. I wish it weren't.

BILL MOYERS: No, now--

SUSAN SONTAG: No, I'm not--

BILL MOYERS: People are paying attention to it.

SUSAN SONTAG: I don't care about that. I would love this to be a very exotic book about something that isn't happening right now. Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. Well, it's not important. It's a book about war. And it's a book about the seriousness of war. I think it's a real stretch for Americans.

Give you one more example, Bill. Americans are so astonished that the Europeans have not followed this government into war. But the European actually know something about war. Why should we be astonished that Germany and Japan actually have become countries in which pacifism is a majority sentiment? We ought to be on our knees thanking God that these two extremely bellicose countries, which are responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people in the Second World War, learned their lesson so well. Because it helped and they're learning this lesson that their cities were absolutely destroyed. And hundreds and hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered in the allied bombing raids.

SUSAN SONTAG: Now, they really don't like war anymore. And now the United States government is mad at Germany because Germany has become pacifist. Sincerely pacifist. I spend a lot of time in Germany. They don't like war. They don't get it anymore. And they do remember that their cities were destroyed. Baghdad is a city of 4 and 1/2 million people. That's a lot of people.

BILL MOYERS: In a pacifist world, though, Susan, wouldn't the Hitler's and the Saddam Hussein's prevail ultimately?

SUSAN SONTAG: No, I'm not saying that the pacifism is the answer. Because it isn't. I'm just saying, isn't it interesting that two countries, which were so militaristic and so aggressive, went in the opposite extreme? This is an extreme, too. I'm just saying it's an extreme. But it does come out of an experience. And it's an experience that Americans don't have. I don't think Americans--

BILL MOYERS: Americans had this one experience that happened in the city where we are talking and in Washington, DC, of this horrible crime, an attack on September 11th.

SUSAN SONTAG: But Americans don't have an experience of their cities being bombed, of hundreds of thousands of civilians--The only thing that happened to us is an extensive way was in the Civil War.

BILL MOYERS: And, of course, so many of those photograph that Matthew Brady took, by which we remember the Civil War, were themselves staged. You write about that.

SUSAN SONTAG: Yes. That's the one experience of war that we've had in this country, and it left a very different lesson in people's mind. On the contrary, interestingly enough, a great deal of the military officer class, of course, comes from the South, comes from the former Confederacy. But Americans are still a country in which violence is greatly esteemed.

For instance, it's very surprising to Americans that all the European countries have given up capital punishment. They also have much lower crime rates than we do. I think Americans now can't even imagine how you could give up capital punishment. I mean, don't you want to punish criminals? Of course, the Europeans think life imprisonment, or long prison sentences, are a real punishment. But we tolerate an enormous amount of violence in this country.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that's because we have made violence so inherent a part of entertainment? The war movies, the violent movies, Gangs of New York?

SUSAN SONTAG: No, I don't. I don't, in that case, think so. I think that, for instance, Japan has a very violent popular culture. Japanese comic strips are unbelievably violent and cruel.

BILL MOYERS: And their video games as well.

SUSAN SONTAG: And their video games. It has a country with a very, very low crime rate.

BILL MOYERS: And, of course, no capital punishment.

SUSAN SONTAG: No, I think we live in a culture-- and it goes back to the original conquest of America of Native American peoples. We are a country that deep down believes in war, believes in violence, believes in the right to violence, believes in cruelty. And we haven't had the experience. And I don't want to be seen as wishing that we do, but still it's a paradox. We haven't had the experience that might lead us to change our attitude. The actual experience of war. War is just a fantasy to people.

BILL MOYERS: What happened to you in Sarajevo to produce that kind of transformation, between someone who sees the power of images and discovers the power of images cannot match the power of reality?

SUSAN SONTAG: I don't think there's anyone who doesn't know this. As I say, the gulf that disturbs me is that the war-makers are generally behind the lines. The war-makers have other interests. In every war, there are people making money out of the war. Even in Sarajevo, in poor, wretched Sarajevo, 300,000 or 400,000 people were all that were left in the city at the time of the siege. More than 100,000 got out. The very beginning of the siege in April, May, 1992, before the siege was absolutely tight. So here's this wretched town and not that big, and receiving thousands of shells and bombs every day.

Well, there were some people making money there. They were black market people who were going at midnight to the Serb lines and the Serbs were selling them food. There were UN soldiers who were selling food to certain civilians who then would sell it at a profit. Even in the most primitive, wretched situations, someone's making a profit out of war. Someone is finding a useful normality. And if you multiply that by big country standards, rich country standards, you know that there are so many motivations for people going to war and making war a normality. It is a way of life. It's a culture. It's a form of business. And it's a tremendous enhancement and reinforcement of power. It's very hard to unseat a government that's making war. And against that, you just have your naked experience, which is, first of all, fear.

BILL MOYERS: You were afraid?

SUSAN SONTAG: All the time. I would be crazy if I weren't afraid. And I came-- was very lucky a couple of times when I really should have been killed. And I saw people killed within a few feet of me on a number of occasions. And the bullet, or the shell, or the shrapnel could have hit me rather than them. Of course you're afraid. But just the overwhelming reality and sense of powerlessness, and the knowledge that almost all wars are not necessary. They really are not necessary. They are not in the best interests of the people who conduct them.

But when you're against a particular war, you feel as if you're running alongside a train which is gradually gaining speed, picking up speed, and you're saying stop, stop. And of course the train isn't going to stop. But maybe it's still going slow enough that some people will also get off and join you on the road. But most people are not going to get off the train because the train has its momentum. And because you want to be with the majority of your tribe. And it's only when something really terrible happens, or there's just so much bloodshed over enough months and years, that people get tired. And they find a way out. And that's, of course, a terrible prospect.

BILL MOYERS: If you can't stop the war, why look at the images?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, I guess I believe in ethical action. You asked me before if I went to Sarajevo-- spent all that time in Sarajevo to write about it. I didn't. I just think there is a place in a life for taking time precisely out of your life. To do something. To respond--

BILL MOYERS: What did you do? You didn't go to be a spectator either. What did you do?

SUSAN SONTAG: No, I worked in the city. I worked in the city. I mean, when I first went, to my great surprise, they asked me to work in the theater. They asked me to direct a play, which I was-- a lot of people think that I went to Sarajevo to direct a play. I would have been crazy to do that. And it wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years. But once I was there and they said, well-- I said, I want to stay. I want to work here. Well, what can you do? I said, well, I can type. I can teach children English. I can do elementary paramedical tasks in the hospital. I can direct movies and plays. Oh, direct a play. I said, no. I didn't want to do it.

BILL MOYERS: In the midst of war?

SUSAN SONTAG: Yeah. And then, I said, what do you want a play for? And they said, we're not animals. We're not just people sheltering in our basements and standing on bread lines and water lines getting killed. When I came back people said, well, who went to the theater? I said the same people who went to the theater before the war. Sarajevo is a middle-sized provincial European city. People went to the theater. People used to drive to Vienna to go to the opera. Vienna isn't that far away. So I did a lot of things, mostly they were education projects in the end.

BILL MOYERS: You haven't written about that have you?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, I'm kind of slow. This is my first attempt to-- I guess I can't really convey it unless I wrote a novel or a play about it. And I'm not quite ready to do that. I'm really slow. This is the best I can do right now about war. Thinking about what war means, how people describe war, how they try to convey the reality of war through images. What it is for us to know so much about war.

I'm a very faithful reader of the New York Times every morning. And when I see that section, the nation at war, and I look at those incredible color photographs of the Iraqi mother with her children cowering in some bombardment, or dead bodies, or American soldiers, or debris, or destroyed houses, day after day after day. I think, is it extraordinary that we can be here and we're so safe and they're there? And that's a situation we're just going to get used to. In the same way we get used to all this surveillance. And you go to an airport and there are soldiers in full camouflage uniform with automatic rifles out. And we're going to get used to that, just as we're going to get used to opening our bags and showing ID every time we go into a building, or a department store, or a concert, or a museum.

SUSAN SONTAG: You get people thinking the world is a garrison. We're at war. We're at war, it's something very abstract called terrorism. In the old days it used to be we were at war with a country. Now we're at war with terrorism. It's like being at war-- war on cancer or war on drugs. So now it's war on terrorism.

BILL MOYERS: What's the antidote? How do you read the Times? I don't read the Times every morning anymore.

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, you're probably in better health than I am because it's driving me crazy.

BILL MOYERS: How do you read it and hold onto your sanity reading what you're reading? Do you remember the three columns of pictures in Afghanistan of the Afghan Taliban soldier being--

SUSAN SONTAG: Yeah, I talk about that in Regarding the Pain of Others. It's by this wonderful war photographer Tyler Hicks, who was in Afghanistan, and, of course, is I think in Baghdad with the great John Burns who I had the good fortune to be with in Sarajevo, during years in Sarajevo.

BILL MOYERS: You remember those?

SUSAN SONTAG: And Hicks did-- I'm sorry?

BILL MOYERS: Do you remember those? Can you still see those--

SUSAN SONTAG: I can see those pictures, they're burned in my brain. And I talk about them in Regarding the Pain of Others. A wounded Taliban soldier has been dragged out of a ditch and he's already seriously wounded by some Northern Alliance soldiers who were on the road near Kabul. And you see him being dragged along the road by an arm and a leg by two Northern Alliance soldiers. Then you see him on the ground in a road, and they're pulling him to his feet. And he's looking up and there's this look of absolute terror on his face. And then the third image of the triptych is he is on his back with his arms out, his knees bent, his trousers are down on his ankles, he's covered with blood from the waist down. And they're killing him. They're firing down on him.

And to see these pictures in the New York Times-- they were published, I believe, in October of2001. In the early stage of the campaign in Afghanistan-- is a horrible experience. Because you're becoming a spectator of something that is totally indecent.

SUSAN SONTAG: And I also think when I look at those pictures, I think what if the world press, somewhere in the world, showed an American soldier in that situation? Being dragged out of the ditch, being pulled to his feet, and then being butchered--naked, half naked on his back? Wouldn't there be the most incredible outcry? And wouldn't we first think of the mother, the wife, the sister, the children of that man? But we don't think. If this is a poor Afghan soldier, we don't think that his family might be looking at those pictures. They have the internet in Kabul. They're on the map.

BILL MOYERS: When I saw that, Susan, I went back in my mind to the picture of the South Vietnamese general executing the suspected Viet Cong. He brought him out to the street handcuffed and he shot him in front of a group of journalists. And arguably, he would not have executed the man if the journalists had not been there. And I grapple with-- this was staged. And I grapple with an execution done for journalists.

SUSAN SONTAG: I think in the case of that photograph, of General Loan executing the suspected Viet Cong soldier, or whatever it was-- militant. That certainly was staged. There is no doubt about it.

BILL MOYERS: That puts the moral authority on us, doesn't it? When you stage an event like that, doesn't that--

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, it tells us something. Listen, that photograph was taken as part of a feeling among lots of American journalists and photojournalists that this war in Vietnam by 1968 had become an atrocity. The other thing that's often said about photojournalists is why don't they intervene? As if Tyler Hicks standing there could have said, now, fellows, wait a minute. That's a prisoner of war. And he's wounded. I mean, you should take him to a prison. You shouldn't kill him. He surrendered. And he's wounded. You're not supposed to execute prisoners of war. Well, I don't think we can reasonably expect Tyler Hicks to try to stop these people from butchering a soldier. I don't think we can expect photographers to do that.

At the same time, the moral situation of photographers I think is a very painful one. And many of them, like James Nachtwey, have talked about the anguish of photographing things which are horrible. And where maybe there are moments when you should just walk away. And say, I'm not going to take a pic-- I can't stop that from happening, but I'm not going to take a picture of it. Because in some way, taking a picture does make you an accomplice of the act-- in some objective way.

BILL MOYERS: But in a way, aren't we all accomplices in this sense. These images we see are from acts being done in our name, by our government, with our taxes. Does an images, does a picture, even though we're not there, lay some kind of moral claim on us as citizens?

SUSAN SONTAG: Absolutely. I think, of course, we are accomplices. And we're in a situation which it's very difficult to dissent, and to criticize this war, and to say this war should end. This war shouldn't have happened, and it should end.

It's not the pictures that are going to tell us that specific message. The pictures are going to tell us how terrible war is. But they're not going to help us understand why this war is wrong. Because the other people will just say, well, hey, war is hell. I mean, don't you know that? Grow up. Did you think war was some pretty activity in which nobody gets killed? Of course, war is hell. So the pictures are not going to tell us to stop a particular war. For that we need debate and we need a two-party system, which we no longer have in this country.

BILL MOYERS: You once wrote that a picture becomes apathetic unless it leads you to action, or something like that. What should we do when we see images like this?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, there are people who want to do something. I'm thinking, for instance, a lot about Rachel Corrie, this 23-year-old American college student from, I believe Olympia, Washington, who was killed in the Gaza Strip. She was part of a group of young American and British people-- I think they were all pretty young-- who had gone into Gaza Strip to act as human shields in this program of bulldozing houses that the Israeli army is doing in the West Bank and Gaza. And I don't think any of them expected to be killed.

And there was an Israeli army bulldozer in a town called Rafah in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, right on the Egyptian border. And there was a house targeted for demolition, the house of a Palestinian doctor, a physician. And so the whole group took up a position in front of the house. And they were wearing these bright orange, neon orange vests. And she, at first stood to the side of the bulldozer with a megaphone and shouted at the soldier, don't do it. Don't do it. See, they didn't think-- they thought they would stop. I mean, they know they can't stop the whole program of oppression, of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza. But they thought they could stop-- anyway, they're witnesses.

BILL MOYERS: This one act they thought they could--

SUSAN SONTAG: This one act. Well, quite a few. And anyway, the bulldozer-- then she got in front of it and kneeled down. And they ran over her and killed her. And letters of Rachel Corrie have been published in The Guardian by her family-- emails. She'd only been there two weeks. I'm sure she expected to come back and have her life in America, this wonderful, young American who-- they're just people. I mean, what I did is, of course, nothing like that. I mean, I endured fear and I endured a war in a siege. But I was not standing in front of a tank like that kid in Tiananmen Square, that famous image of standing in front of the tank in 1989 at the time. Or Rachel Corrie who stood in front of a bulldozer and was killed. I didn't do anything like that. But I do feel the need-- I am an activist. I feel a need to put my life where my mouth is, or my life where my keyboard is. I feel a need to act on what I believe, or what I say I believe. If I don't act on it, then I don't think it's worth anything.

BILL MOYERS: Images play such a vivid part in our memories. What's the most vivid picture in your mind that you ever gazed upon?

SUSAN SONTAG: The most important pictures of my life are the pictures taken in Dachau and Bergen-Belsen when the concentration camps were liberated in1945. I saw those pictures when I-- well, I'm born in 1933, so I was 12 years old when I saw those pictures. And I think I could say that my whole life is divided into before I saw those pictures and after. I had a kind of revelation, as if something that just cut me in half. I thought when I saw those pictures-- and everybody has seen those pictures-- that I suddenly thought, oh my God, this is what human beings can do to other human beings.

And I think the wound of that, of coming from a very-- from a childhood in which I'd never seen any violence at all. I grew up mostly in Tucson and in Los Angeles. And I'd never seen any kind of violence of any kind. And the movies of that period of 1940s were incredibly unviolent, as everybody knows who sees them now. And I didn't know anything. Of course, I'd followed the war as a small child in the newspapers. But it wasn't real to me. And then, just to see those photographs, I think it's turning point in my life. Those are the most--

BILL MOYERS: What did they turn you to? Obviously, they repelled you in horror, as they did all of us. I'm just one year younger than you and I remember seeing those photographs for the first time. But they did something to you they didn't do to everybody.

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, it's more than being repelled. Of course, I just felt it was a revelation. I just thought, oh, well, this is reality. Reality is that human beings are capable of the most extraordinary wickedness. And that, I guess, I thought one must never forget this. One must never forget that. And I want to forget it. Because actually, I'm a very-- I'm not all paranoid. In my normal life, very trusting and rather emotional. And I don't anticipate evil or bad things in my own life, just the opposite. And I've been very lucky and I've been very privileged. I mean, apart from having a couple of really serious bouts of illness, I've had a very--

BILL MOYERS: [INAUDIBLE] cancer came out of that.

SUSAN SONTAG: Yeah. Apart from that, I've had a very privileged life, I think. And a life in which anything, really-- I mean, a privileged life of an educated person pursuing a respectable profession in a comfortable part of the world, which is the United States of America. But then I think most people in the world have completely different lives. I read somewhere that only about 10% of people on the planet have both a refrigerator and a telephone.

BILL MOYERS: So perhaps--

SUSAN SONTAG: So think how different our lives are, Bill, from the lives that everybody is leading. And I just want to be in touch with as much reality as I can.

Perhaps the power of the image then is to remind us that there are terrible things happening in the world. And to bring to those of us who are privileged and protected an awareness that we would never experience otherwise.

SUSAN SONTAG: I think that's true. But I think you have to factor in the complacency and the fearfulness of fortress America. There are large parts of the world in which we couldn't be having this discussion. We couldn't be saying--

BILL MOYERS: [INAUDIBLE].

SUSAN SONTAG: Yes. In which we wouldn't have to say, pictures can tell us that terrible things happen in the world because your life is telling you that terrible things happen. But we are so privileged in this country. We are so safe. And we feel so safe. And precisely because we feel so safe, we also feel so afraid.

BILL MOYERS: You said a moment ago you were born in 1933, so you're 70 years old. I'm about to be 70. You've written all of these successful, powerful books. You've left quite a footprint. What's important to you now? Very personal question, what's important to you now? What do you value most?

SUSAN SONTAG: The same things I always valued. See, I'm under the illusion, very American illusion that I'm just beginning, and my best work is ahead of me. I don't have any sense of winding down or winding up. I feel exactly the same side as I always felt. Just want to be a better writer and a better citizen and a better person, and to go on.

BILL MOYERS: But you go on, in a sense, challenging people to join the dissent. To lead their tribe and to try to identify with the other tribe. To stand outside the tribe and speak for the other. That's a very unwise thing to do in a time like this when patriotism has become so consensual and so conforming.

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, it is also a Christian thing to say-- I mean, religion is so misused in this country. But after all, the fundamental wisdom of an ethical power of religion is to treat the other as valuable. To say that you care about other people. I consider this absolutely mainstream ethical opinion. And for instance, at the very heart of true Christianity. And I do believe in the ethical duty of a human being to extend forbearance and charity, and sympathy to other human beings.

BILL MOYERS: I was aware of the ethical dimension in your life. I was not aware of the religious hold in your--

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, I don't like to claim the religious thing, except now that I see religion being so misused in this country.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, because what we have now is a kind of state gobbled gook triumphalism, which is posing as religion. So we're being asked-- but it has no content. It's simply God is on the side of America and we should all pray for faith, and support our leaders.

It's quite interesting that the Pope has come out very strongly against the war on Iraq, the American invasion of Iraq. But this is not taken seriously here because religion is just-- religiosity, the religious faith is just a [INAUDIBLE] arm of government propaganda.

BILL MOYERS: Are you a person of faith?

SUSAN SONTAG: I'm a person of respect for great religious traditions. And the ones that are motivated by a true ethical concern.

BILL MOYERS: The life of Jesus?

SUSAN SONTAG: The many Christian thinkers are very important to me, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that played a role in your reaction to the photographs of Buchenwald?

SUSAN SONTAG: No. No, I don't. I don't feel-- I was taken to mass all through my childhood because I was largely brought up by a Catholic nanny, Irish Catholic nanny, who took me to church every Sunday. That's my only formal religious connection with anything formal. I'm not a Catholic convert. My background is completely secular. I come from a secular Jewish family, a family of Jewish origin that had been secular for generations.

I don't like to claim the religious identification. And I don't think it plays a great role in my thinking, except I'm getting more and more angry at the way religion is being misused as simply propaganda for the current Republican administration. That really makes me angry. And then that makes me want to say, as somebody for whom Pascal, and Kirkegaard, and Simone Veilhave mattered a lot, well, hey, that's not what Christianity is about.

BILL MOYERS: It's not the first time. Remember Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky affair went to the prayer breakfast with his Bible in his hand. And suddenly he was there in church on Sunday with the Bible in his hand. There's something very American about that secular invocation of piety for political purposes.

SUSAN SONTAG: Yeah. But I just remember that it didn't use to be the case. From Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Theodore and Franklin D Roosevelt were obviously completely secular people and did not invoke religious language. In fact, Lincoln was often called an atheist. Lincoln was quite disliked by many people.

BILL MOYERS: It did talk about providence in God's will. That's a different thing to seek it than to invoke it he did.

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, what interests me in the great religious traditions is not the way they support state power, but the way they support ethical action, authentic ethical action. That's what I see in somebody like Rachel Corrie. That's what I see-- it doesn't have to be Christian, obviously. It can be Muslim. It can be Buddhist. It can be Jewish. That's what I see in the actions of these Israeli reserve soldiers who are refusing to serve in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. They're not refusing to serve in the army, they just say they won't serve in the occupied territories. I think those are authentic ethical acts.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think gives rise to conscious? Because I think conscious determines our reaction to these images. What do you think gives rise to it?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, I think you have to have models. I feel very enriched by the models that I've had. Although they are--

BILL MOYERS: Who?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, they're mostly-- they're not so much models in real life when I was young. They were models from literature, from books. Oh, I don't know. You know, Bill, I read the Tale of Two Cities probably when I was about eight or nine years old. I was a very precocious reader. And Sydney Carton giving up his light for his friend. It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done."

You're either drawn to that or you're not. You have an idea of righteous action. It's hard to talk about without embarrassment because it sounds as if you're praising yourself. But it's what you're turned on by to put it in a very crude way, the way you are-- what you admire. I think we're made up of our admirations. That's what we are, is what we admire.

SUSAN SONTAG: And the terrible thing about the mass culture that we live in is it gives us a very low standard of admiration. It's about some idea of success. Or just celebrity, being famous. And being famous and being a celebrity is not quite the same thing. Making money, obviously. And along with that comes a lot of cynicism. People really being suspicious of anything that they could identify as idealism. So they just want to laugh or tell you to come off it if you have some kind of-- any kind of ideal that would take you away from the mainstream shopping mentality. Or just born to shop and take care of our nearest and dearest. And be as successful as we possibly can. That gives us, I think, a very shallow idea of what kind of life we could lead.

I treasure all the things that I have access to. It has come a lot from books, but it's come from all forms of art, and music, and quite a few movies. Not all of them foreign moves, but most of them foreign movies, where I've felt there were people in them that I actually could admire. I think that I could say, oh, I would like to be like that. I'd like to be in the same zone, a zone where those standards are. And they do involve notions of service or connection with other people.

SUSAN SONTAG: Then, of course, if you live long enough, there will be times when you actually meet people you admire. Maybe it's a doctor who was a particularly wonderful and selfless and conscientious doctor. Or people who were in some kind of social activism. Or just somebody who has really acted on principle in his or her own life in a difficult situation where there was an easy way out that was kind of low, and a better way out there was harder. And you should treasure these examples because we just do have this one life. And the question is not whether there's life after death, whether there's life before death.

BILL MOYERS: Do you fear growing old?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, I fear the end of life. I actually don't feel any different than I ever felt. But that's weird. I mean, of course, when I look in the mirror I see I'm not the same person that I looked like. But I don't feel any different. So as long as I have the same interests and energies-- I have more energy than I know what to do with.

BILL MOYERS: That's true with me. I only feel old when I look in the mirror and see that that's not the same face that I saw 20 years ago when I was interviewing someone. It is just the fear that it's running out. That you're going to not get things done you want to get to done.

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, I think the most important thing is to be where you are. I mean, I don't have a list of things. It's not like I have a laundry list and I say I'm going to write this book and that book, and then I'm going to direct this play, and then I want to direct an opera. And then I want to go up the Amazon. It's not like a list. I think the big struggle is to be in the present, really in the present, and really responsive to as much reality as you can.

And then, what you have to do, it just comes to you. You say, well, I'm going to maybe take this risk. Or do this other thing. But the most important part is that you remain active. There must become a time-- Bill, it will come to us, too-- when you are actually tired. And maybe that's the time to do a lot of traveling and have fun. And not retirement exactly, but different kinds of pressures. But as long as you have energy and you're interested in-- I'm interested in so many things. Then the question of what age I am doesn't really enter into it.

BILL MOYERS: Do you remember what Lear said on the heath to Gloucester? He asked him, how do you see the world? And Gloucester, who was blind-- blind Gloucester responded, I see it feelingly. I see it feelingly. Where does that come from?

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, I don't have any problem about feeling because I'm just a wash in an ocean of feeling. What I have a problem, and I think everyone has this problem, is I want to know enough so that what I say is true. And I don't identify truth with my feelings. I do think there's a world that exists outside me. I could be wrong about things because I'm simply ignorant, because I don't understand. Because I don't have the right information. Because I don't have the right first-hand experience. So I'm not against feelings because I think feelings are the sea in which we row our little boat. But I'm really committed in so far as I can, and it's a struggle because it's very easy to just say go back on your feelings.

Or the sentiments of the little tribe you belong to. We've talked about the big tribe, but there are little tribes. There are even tribes of dissenters, tribes of people who are standing outside the mainstream. They form a tribe, too.

SUSAN SONTAG: Somebody sends me a petition to sign. And I see it's six people I really know have already signed it. About some social or political question. And these are people I know and I like. And I have a little doubt about the petition itself. And is it quite right what it says? And maybe the wording is a bit vulgar or hysterical to me, and I really don't agree with it. But on the other hand, my friends have signed it.

Well, I make myself not sign it. But there's a part of me that wants to sign it because I want to be part of my little tribe. And you always have to be--it's not just as you're a single person standing against a whole mass of people. There are many tribes. There many groupings. And the impulse just to be with people that are more or less of your opinion, I think you have to say, my first loyalty is to the truth, to as much truth as I can take in.

BILL MOYERS: My own belief that there is a objectivity outside of us makes me more interested in the story than in the image. Because as you say in the book, pictures don't speak for themselves. They have to have text and context for the information to be appropriate, don't you think?

SUSAN SONTAG: I think that we have to know things and we have to know a little bit of history. This is something, by the way, Americans aren't very good at. I wonder, for instance, how many people know that Iraq has a history. How many people could tell you what when Iraq started? Because Iraq started only in 1920. There was no Iraq before 1920. It was made up in the aftermath of the settlement of the First World War and it was a British colony. Made to be a British colony.

If you start to know about the history of Iraq, or the history of the United States, or the history of any other place, you're going to think a little differently. So that historical context, I think, is something that we want to set the images in. And we always want to be making the effort to think how other people think. What would you feel like if you were an Iraqi civilian who hated Saddam Hussein? Let's take that for granted, of course, as I'm sure many of the citizens of Iraq do, because he's such a horrible dictator. Still, what might you feel? I don't think most people-- it's hard to make that effort to think how the other person feels. But that's really what a moral life is, an ethical life is, is trying to take in some of the reality of what other people feel, or how they see things from their point of view. Which doesn't mean that everybody has their own opinion.

SUSAN SONTAG: I'm not a relativist either. I'm not saying, OK, you people in Africa, you believe in genital mutilation. That's your tribal belief. Well, I have my tribal beliefs, but I respect your tribal beliefs. No. I think some tribal belief-- I have very absolute standards on certain matters. That being one of them. And I think tribes can be wrong and folk beliefs can be wrong. And I don't think every belief is worthy of respect. But still, you have to start by thinking where people are coming from. And you have to start by thinking what sense of injury they have. Lots of people have tremendous sense of injury, and that is motivating them. And that's creating feeling.

BILL MOYERS: Now I understand why you go to see for yourself.

SUSAN SONTAG: I think you have to see for yourself. Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Let me ask you to read the last few lines of your book. Because I think they bring me very close to understanding what you're saying about the difference between the images we see on television and in the papers and what happens to people in war. I've [INAUDIBLE]. You can start anywhere you want to.

SUSAN SONTAG: Sure.

SUSAN SONTAG: "These dead are supremely uninterested in the living, in those who took their lives-- in witnesses and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? We, this we is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through, we don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is, and how normal it becomes. Can't understand. Can't imagine.

That's what every soldier, and every journalist, and aid worker, and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby stubbornly feels. And they are right."

BILL MOYERS: The book is Regarding the Pain of Others. Susan Sontag, thank you very much.

SUSAN SONTAG: Thank you, Bill Moyers.